Tag Archives: Big Data

Why Google’s Waze Is Trading User Data With Local Governments

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“Planners in Rio de Janeiro are watching the aggregated data feeds of thousands of smartphones being walked or driven around a city, thanks to two popular travel apps, Waze and Moovit.  The goal is traffic management, and it involves swapping data for data. More cities are lining up to get access, and while the data the apps are sharing is all anonymous for now, identifying details could get more specific if cities like what they see, and people become more comfortable with being monitored through their smartphones in return for incentives.  The app can tell how fast a driver is moving and even get a complete record of their driving history.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/07/07/why-google-waze-helps-local-governments-track-its-users/

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Google Joins Yahoo in Offering Bitcoin Prices

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“A spokesperson from Google said: ‘We added a number of currencies to Google Finance, from the Icelandic króna to the East Caribbean dollar to Bitcoin. We’re always working to provide more of the financial data people are looking for.’  Google Finance has launched a bitcoin price tracker, offering market information across several major fiat currencies as well as access to breaking news in the digital currency world.  Users can access prices in BTC/USD markets, as well as prices in pound sterling, yen, euro, renminbi, Australian dollar and Canadian dollar markets.  The tool also enables review of historical prices dating back to June 2013.”

http://www.coindesk.com/google-bitcoin-price-conversion/

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N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

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“The F.B.I. is developing what it calls its ‘next generation identification’ project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.  The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.  The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html?_r=1

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Wendy McElroy: America’s Electronic Police State

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“The fusion centers share many characteristics of a surveillance state with the NSA. These characteristics include a disregard for civil rights, secret records, the use of informants, little to no transparency, the targeting of political opponents, and an ever-expanding mission.  Since Snowden’s revelations, the NSA has been under a spotlight that reduces its ability to hide activities such as the warrantless recording of emails and phone calls. NSA is subjected to public controversy, with civil liberty groups pushing to rein in its power. By contrast, the fusion centers are comparatively invisible, which allows them to operate covertly in a manner more typical of a surveillance state.”

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/americas-electronic-police-state

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EFF awards Apple, Google perfect privacy scores

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“Over the past 12 months, nine technology companies have drastically improved the way that they handle government data requests and as a result, the EFF says that they have received perfect scores from their point of view.  In its annual Who Has Your Back report, the EFF says that eleven companies overall now have perfect scores. Last year, the only two companies that scored as highly were Sonic.net and Twitter but outrage over NSA revelations and other disturbing things has brought about change in many companies.  The EFF says that there are now 20 technology companies out of the ones surveyed that are publishing those reports.”

http://www.technologytell.com/gadgets/144227/eff-awards-apple-google-perfect-privacy-scores/

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FBI withdraws NSL after Microsoft challenge; takes data directly instead

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“The FBI withdrew a national security letter targeting an Office 365 enterprise customer following Microsoft’s challenge to a provision of the letter gagging the company from informing the target, according to court documents unsealed Thursday. The existence of the legal tussle between the FBI and Microsoft was unsealed in court documents (PDF) Thursday. The name of the targeted Microsoft customer was blacked out in the records. The 2013 national security letter was not included in the documents.  Still, the authorities managed to prevail anyway and scored the information directly from Microsoft’s customer, according to the record.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/fbi-withdraws-national-security-letter-following-microsoft-challenge/

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Google’s real plan behind the purchase of the Nest thermostat

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“Google purchased Nest back in January this year for $3.2B and people everywhere are still wondering why.  The number of Nests sold is already in the millions. But it’s not like I’m going to go and buy another one anytime soon, which seems like it would be a problem for Google. Before Nest was acquired by Google, it had already solved this conundrum however. A seldom reported business model the Nest has been slowly building is around annual subscriptions to energy providers rather than consumers.  A dozen or so major energy providers in the US are paying a fee to Nest for each subscriber annually, somewhere in the range of $40 / customer / year.”

http://www.itworld.com/consumerization-it/416110/googles-plan-rake-cash-nest-thermostat

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Google Acquires Titan Aerospace, High-Altitude Drone Startup

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“The details of the purchase weren’t disclosed, but the deal comes after Facebook disclosed its own purchase of a Titan Aerospace competitor in U.K.-based Ascenta for its globe-spanning Internet plans.  Both Ascenta and Titan Aerospace are in the business of high altitude drones, which cruise nearer the edge of the earth’s atmosphere and provide tech that could be integral to blanketing the globe in cheap, omnipresent Internet connectivity to help bring remote areas online. According to the WSJ, Google will be using Titan Aerospace’s expertise and tech to contribute to Project Loon, the balloon-based remote Internet delivery project it’s currently working on along these lines.”

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/google-acquires-titan-aerospace-the-drone-company-pursued-by-facebook/

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Politician and paedophile among first to ask Google to ‘be forgotten’

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“An ex-politician seeking re-election has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed.  A man convicted of possessing child abuse images has requested links to pages about his conviction to be wiped.  And a doctor wants negative reviews from patients removed from the results.  The original case was brought by a Spanish man who complained that an auction notice of his repossessed home on Google’s search results had infringed his privacy.  The ruling surprised many because it contradicted the advice of the European Union’s advocate general who said last year that search engines were not obliged to honour such requests.”

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527

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Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Washington influence

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“Nine years ago, the company opened a one-man lobbying shop, disdainful of the capital’s pay-to-play culture.  Since then, Google has soared to near the top of the city’s lobbying ranks, placing second only to General Electric in corporate lobbying expenditures in 2012 and fifth place in 2013.  This summer, Google will move to a new Capitol Hill office, doubling its Washington space to 55,000 square feet — roughly the size of the White House.  Google’s increasingly muscular Washington presence matches its expanded needs and ambitions as it has fended off a series of executive- and legislative-branch threats to regulate its activities and well-funded challenges by its corporate rivals.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is-transforming-power-and-politicsgoogle-once-disdainful-of-lobbying-now-a-master-of-washington-influence/2014/04/12/51648b92-b4d3-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html

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